Western Digital has partnered with Microsoft to demonstrate that it is possible to reclaim rare earth elements at scale from the mountains of hard drives hyperscalers routinely shred.
While a couple of years ago the announcement might have felt like a nice feel good sustainability story, right now it has a much more geopolitical edge, with rare earths at the centre of US efforts to establish a ceasefire in Ukraine, and China’s retaliation against the Trump administration’s tariffs.
Last week’s announcement from Western Digital pointed out that hard drives use a spectrum of rare earths, “like Neodymium (Nd), Praseodymium (Pr) and Dysprosium (Dy), prized for their magnetic properties to help HDDs precisely read and write data.” They also contain plenty of steel, aluminium and copper, as well as gold.
Needless to say, many end of life hard drives will end up in landfill, or in the case of slightly more security conscious individuals, sat in boxes under desks. Datacentre operators, with security obligations to live up to, will typically destroy redundant drives.
According to a blog by Western Digital, this typically means rare earths are lost as metal components are melted down. Which means they can’t be reused in new drives – or repurposed in other rare earth hungry industries, such as electric vehicles, wind turbines or mobile devices. The recycling rate for rare earths is less than 10 percent.
The disk drive maker partnered with Microsoft to reprise “50,000 pounds of shredded end-of-life HDDs, mounting caddies and other materials”. They used “meticulous segregation of components” as well as “advanced chemical processes” to recapture around “80 percent by mass of the feedstock” and around 90 percent high-yield elemental and rare earth recovery.
They also claimed that recycling rare earths led to “an estimated 95 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions” compared to mining and processing new material.
Jackie Jung, vice president of Global Operations Strategy and Corporate Sustainability at Western Digital said that reproduced at scale, the program could have a significant ripple effect. “This project isn’t just a milestone; it’s a blueprint for large-scale, domestic recycling of essential metals and materials that will drive sustainable progress for years to come.”
"Sustainability" and reduced emmissions might be unlikely to attract the attention of a US government that has committed itself to a “drill baby drill”.
However, the US’s abundant natural resources are surprisingly light on rare earths. China dominates global reserves, and has slapped a hold on exports in retaliation for the sky high tariffs the White House has imposed on imports of Chinese goods.
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